The Ubuntu Edge crowd-sourced smart-phone campaign is set to end tonight, but Canonical is short by twenty million dollars on its crowd-funding campaign and there's been no last minute surprises to push the Ubuntu-powered converged device ahead.

Another Virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit is set to take place next week to get a better grasp of the Ubuntu 13.10 goals reached and the work ahead within the Ubuntu ecosystem for the next three to six months.

We know that a lot of Mir improvements/features should land this week with the Ubuntu 13.10 feature freeze being imminent. The first Bazaar commit this week to the Mir Display Server has added in support for per-session display configuration.

As expected with Canonical's plans to land the Mir Display Server with XMir in Ubuntu 13.10 where Unity 7 will run atop XMir by default for supported configurations, the various components have now landed in the Ubuntu 13.10 "Saucy" main archive.

With there being experimental XMir-based Xubuntu 13.10 images available for the Xfce desktop spin and a request going out for testing, I ran some Phoronix performance tests to compare the XMir performance penalty for 2D and 3D workloads.

Xubuntu, the Xfce-based flavor of Xubuntu, is presently evaluating the use of Canonical's Mir display server via the XMir X11 transition layer. For helping in the process and testing, the Ubuntu derivative has made public some Xubuntu XMir images.

One of the feature limitations of using the Mir Display Server up to this point has been when using multiple monitors (or say a laptop connected to a projector) the only display configuration possibility is using a cloned mode whereby the screens are the same. Canonical's Mir developers have begun working on improved multi-monitor handling.

As anticipated, Canonical announced today their Ubuntu Edge smart-phone. However, details are scarce and they don't even have the hardware specifications ironed out but are first trying to raise financing via crowd-funding.

On the Ubuntu web-site has been a teaser about "the line where two surfaces meet" and a 4-day countdown (ending 22 July). There's been wild speculation about this countdown and now it appears it will be an announcement of Ubuntu Edge, the first Ubuntu-powered smartphone.

Canonical's Christopher Halse Rogers wrote a blog post over the weekend to try to clear up the XMir performance situation and say that Canonical engineers are working on improving the performance, as users begin to discover there's a performance hit in using XMir.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has been running the Mir Display Server for the past two weeks. After doing so, he's very happy with the Mir experience in Ubuntu 13.10 at this stage in its development and already feels that it's smoother than with X. He's blogged about his experience of running Mir on Ubuntu Linux.

While Ubuntu Linux no longer participates in alpha releases, other members of the Ubuntu family did their first 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" alpha releases today. Coming out today in 13.10 Alpha 1 form is Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, and Ubuntu Kylin.

More Mir news today besides the surprise announcement that Canonical is now planning to use the Mir Display Server by default in Ubuntu 13.10, there's some other interesting news involving Mir benchmarking, the Mir 0.0.5 release, and Kubuntu avoiding Mir/XMir and reaffirming their commitment to X.Org and Wayland.

Originally Canonical was planning to ship their Mir Display Server by default in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on the desktop and in Ubuntu 13.10 still be using an X.Org Server outside of mobile devices. However, it's been announced today that with Ubuntu 13.10 they will now be using Mir by default.

For those curious about the Mir Display Server development but aren't actively following its Bazaar development repository, the development continues to be dominated by Canonical and here's some numbers looking at the current development statistics surrounding Mir.

With all of the controversy surrounding the Mir Display Server for Ubuntu Linux on non-Unity desktops, a Canonical engineer sought to find out what Linux desktops would work atop Mir if using the XMir X.Org Server compatibility layer.

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